Live or Dead?, Flipside #16,
Oct 1979

B-PEOPLE/UNITS/PINK
SECTION
Hong Kong Cafe July 5 by @1 The B-People opened, but just
because they're a new band, evolving out of the IDS, dropping Mike, adding
pat on sax etc....and there you have it. They sounded like an orchestra
at 78, a mysterious hypnotic sound and lyrics, when audible, were beyond
me (?). Go see them, another plus for L.A. The Units are a band from San
Francisco which are basically the Screamers in setup, lacking the distracting
Tomato singing. Their sound is much fuller than the Screamers because
they actually play the synthesizers, not just stand behind them and twiddle
knobs. They trade-off bass and lead parts on their units and the drummer
puts on a steady rock bead. Besides the music, they have a film presentation;
to start they project slides onto a car hood and beat on the images of
police cars, sun-tan girls, etc. with sticks, then they just us movies
behind them. I was fortunate enought to catch them in S.F. where they
were able to set up two projectors on bigger screens than the one used
at the Hong Kong. A great band worth seeing. Note: their set is very tastefully
short. The Pink Section are an art school band, looking very S.F. art.
Their set was full of technical problems with the lights and the PA, but
still when I saw them in S.F. they were yucky. The girl singer puts on
a very nauseating, spoiled brat act on stage and the music was a bit tiring.

Slash Magazine, September 1979

Another
out Of town band that shook this boy silly was The Units, fron
neighboring village San Francisco. They played the Hong Kong a
While back with Pink Section and destroyed just about every concept I
had about "electronic" combos. As every other cro-magnon I know I always
have had this underlying feeling that synthesizers and other sterile looking
gadgets were genrally intruders on the rock in roll field and that nothing
genuinely "alive" could be extracted from their circuits, no matter how
flash and brilliant some of their rock n roll impersonations could be.
That night, watching the Units pound their machines into submission, I
knew that another cliched concept of mine was biting the dust once and
for all. I also knew that there probably was a future to rock n roll after
all, and that future did not necessarily include anything resembling guitars.
The Units' sound was so tight, their individual presence so devoid of
bullshit and posing that I even overlooked the half-assed "multi-media"
business with the home movies flickering in the background.